


rituals

by doomcountry



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Hopeful Ending, Human/Monster Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Loneliness, M/M, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-18
Updated: 2019-10-18
Packaged: 2020-12-22 10:49:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21075119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomcountry/pseuds/doomcountry
Summary: Martin is the first person to knock on the Archivist's door since it arrived, fully, into its little waiting temple. The Archivist saw him coming from down the hall, but decides to feign interest when the knob turns, and Martin—still a little bit smaller, a little more translucent than before—stands uncertainly just outside the room.





	rituals

**Author's Note:**

> To be read alongside [can't be helped](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20681534) for best effect <3

I.

On his first day back at work, Martin knocks on the Archivist’s office door.

In the last three weeks, it has been occupying this space, for all intents and purposes, alone. Settling in. Making itself comfortable. Its staff—what is left, anyway—avoids it. It does not leave the Archives, and therefore avoids any awkward confrontations with the humans who occupy the other floors of this building.

If it needs something done, Basira and Daisy Know it without ever having to step across its threshold; the Archivist finds this mode of communication to be efficient and satisfactory. It rarely needs anything from them, though. They sit in the breakroom most days, waiting uneasily for their brains to relay information to them from nowhere. Occasionally a file is slipped below the office door. Sometimes it listens to their conversations in the hall, but never too closely. There is little need for archival assistants anymore, but letting them go would take time and energy the Archivist doesn’t feel are necessary to expend. It lets them linger, and does not care much what they do with their time.

Martin has been gone these three weeks. _Sick leave. _The Archivist recognizes this as a joke, but isn’t sure who, exactly, is supposed to find it funny. It supposes Elias gets something out of it. Its eyes, of course, have been on Martin the entire time, patiently sending knowledge back, where the Archivist digests it: a great deal of sleeping, a few bouts of violent anxiety, and a great deal of Chinese takeaway delivered to the dismal flat in Stockwell. All of it of very little interest. The Archivist has not been paying very close attention.

Martin is the first person to knock on its door since it arrived, fully, into its little waiting temple. The Archivist saw him coming from down the hall, but decides to feign interest when the knob turns, and Martin—still a little bit smaller, a little more translucent than before—stands uncertainly just outside the room.

He has a cup of tea in his hands. The Archivist looks at him, briefly, and does not say anything.

For a good minute they look at each other—Martin, it can tell, strenuously avoiding all of the Archivist’s staring eyes but for the two originals in its face. It can feel Martin’s brain humming and his heart beating slightly above the normal human rate. The tea is already cold. He had spent too long debating with himself outside the door about whether or not to knock on it. It has taken him an hour to work up the courage to come this far down the hall. The Archivist blinks, once, puts down the folder in its hands, and sits back a little.

Martin looks down at the flat carpeted floor, the space of four feet between him and the desk, and grips the mug of cold tea in his hands. The Archivist watches him muster some bravery, and then take six or seven much-too-hasty steps to close the distance, and hears the ceramic _thunk _as the tea is set down with rather too much force on the desk in front of it.

“I brought you some tea,” says Martin, perhaps a little stupidly.

The Archivist looks at the tea. It looks at Martin, who looks back. Martin’s jaw is working furiously. The Archivist notices a twitch in Martin’s little finger, a nervous energy.

The Archivist blinks again. All its other eyes must blink, too, because Martin flinches.

The Archivist is not going to drink the stone-cold tea. It looks back down at the case file on the desk. An old one. Gertrude Robinson must have been freshly hired when she had taken it down. It is crisply typed up on weathered, yellow paper. It thrums with anxious energy, little vibrations all up and down the Archivist’s arms. It isn’t much, but it will satisfy for now. The tape recorder at its elbow clicks on. A deeper click settles nicely in the back of the Archivist’s throat. _Statement of_—

“So you’re—it, then.”

It glances up again.

Martin has not left. He is standing in the same spot, fists clenched at his sides now, as if he doesn’t know what to do with them. He is staring at the Archivist with his head craned back a little, as if reluctant to examine it too closely.

Martin wets his lips nervously. “You’re it. The Archivist.” He says it carefully, slowly, with the hesitation of someone about to plunge their hand into a nest of snakes.

The Archivist has gotten used to its own voice by now, but it supposes its layers and creaking static must be a jolt to this visitor. Martin flinches again, visibly, when he hears it.

“Yes,” says the Archivist, and returns to its papers.

It waits for Martin to go away. Martin does not go away. He is still there a few moments later, when the Archivist looks up again.

“Is there something I can help you with?” it says. It gets the sense that Martin is waiting for something, or hoping for something, the way he is staring. He is staring with an intensity the Archivist hasn’t yet experienced from anything other than itself.

It takes a long time for Martin to speak again. When he does his voice is thick. It sounds dredged-up, a little cracked.

“Where’s Jon?” he asks.

The Archivist supposes it should have expected this, and perhaps prepared the knowledge a little earlier, before the three weeks’ sick leave were up. An oversight, and one it won’t repeat.

“I am Jon,” it says simply. “Close the door on your way out, please.” It primly pushes away the mug of cold tea across the desk, and Martin, by instinct, picks it up.

It takes him another few minutes to leave. He does close the door. The sound of its latch is a satisfying one, and the Archivist settles again, comfortably, into the waiting silence.

It is pleased that Martin is back at work, in the way that one might be pleased by a temperate afternoon. But it hopes such interruptions will be kept to a minimum from now on.

* * *

The next time it sees Martin, he has come bearing tea again. This time it is hot, which is no more or less appetizing to the Archivist than when it is cold, but it gives Martin a cursory _thank you _when he puts it down on the desk. It observes him abstractly—a little more color in his face now, and he is standing a little straighter. This is a good sign. The Archivist doubts the three weeks of _sick leave _had much actual effect on Martin’s recovery from Loneliness; being at work, and therefore productive, around other people, seems to be doing a much better job of it.

This time, Martin doesn’t hesitate very long before he asks a question.

“So he’s gone?”

It’s a difficult question for him to ask; the Archivist is aware of this. Asking it is like pulling a tooth from his own jaw. It is aware of the rate of his pulse, the synapses firing in certain parts of his brain, the churning nerves in his gut, and is aware of what he is really asking. It considers for a moment whether or not to answer, and decides to be a little merciful.

“It would benefit you to be more specific,” it says.

It likes the bite in Martin’s voice when he speaks again. That’s good. A little bit familiar.

“Jon,” Martin says. “Jon is—”

It isn’t the question Martin _wants _to ask. The Archivist gives him a little nudge. Just the faintest brush against his brain. If Martin notices, he doesn’t show it.

“Is he still in there,” Martin says, finally, in one long, shaky breath, “somewhere?”

Better.

“Yes,” says the Archivist.

Martin seems taken aback by this. He blinks, stands a little straighter.

“He is?” His voice is very soft, suddenly. The bite is gone from it. Soft and disturbed.

“That is,” says the Archivist, “he never left.” It folds its hands neatly, one over the other, on the surface of its desk. “I believe you may have been misinformed. Or perhaps you came to your own assumptions. I am not separate from Jonathan Sims. I am not in possession of his body.” It frowns a little at this idea. So alien to itself. Much more akin to something the Stranger would try, _possession. _Or even the Web. “I am simply that aspect of Jonathan Sims most tied to the Eye, which has finally overstepped the rest of him.” It looks placidly at Martin, who has gone a little pale. “Do you understand?”

Martin’s mouth opens, a bit like a fish. No words come out. Behind his glasses his eyes are wide. Pity, the Archivist thinks. He doesn’t seem to understand at all.

“At any rate,” it says, “I am here to work. You are here to work as well. I suggest we both get back to it.”

The roiling hum of all of Martin’s questions is crowding its ears, a bee’s buzz turned up loud. The Archivist looks at the clock. It is three in the afternoon.

“Is there anything else?” it says.

Martin doesn’t answer. He closes his mouth. The way he is looking at the Archivist now is—dimmer. Softer. Perhaps a little sad. Perhaps his lip quivers. Perhaps he takes a shaky breath before he turns and leaves, closing the door softly behind him. The Archivist notes his slow retreat down the hall, the anxious twisting of his fingers, how many times he stops to look back. It notes all this, and tucks it away safely at the back of its brain, where what is left of Jonathan Sims clutches at it with desperate fingers.

* * *

The Archivist has twenty-four eyes on its face, including the originals. They are arranged symmetrically on either side of its nose, angled in a pleasing configuration, not unlike the configuration of a spider’s face. Other eyes blink from the backs of its hands, from the hollow of its throat, from the back of its neck. It is two inches taller than Jonathan Sims, and its fingers have the benefit of a fourth joint, which types and flicks through filing folders with much greater ease. Where its blood shows, at the wrist, its blood is black. If someone were to be so foolish as to cut the Archivist, it would bleed that ink.

In all other respects the Archivist has chosen to keep its body more or less the same. It is fond of the circular scars, like cigarette burns, that pepper the face, and of the silvery third-degree tissue on the hand. It wears Jonathan Sims’ glasses perched on its nose, and when it cares to, it pulls Jonathan Sims’ long hair back into an elastic tie. Beholding does not care what its avatar looks like, but the Archivist has a certain fondness, a certain nostalgia. These are rituals. These things harm nothing.

Perhaps its assistants assume that it is devoid of feeling, or that it seeks to hurt them, and that is why they avoid it. All except Martin, who has been brave enough to come looking. The Archivist decides it must call a meeting soon, to reassure them. It does not seek to hurt them. Far from it. Willingly or not, they have been dedicated to it. It respects these bonds. It even likes them. Basira is closer to Beholding than she knows, and the Hunt has never been an unwelcome presence. And Martin—well, if nothing else, the Archivist admires his tenacity. To survive the Lonely, and then to meet the Archivist face to face with at least a veil of courage—it likes this. Should the Archivist need them someday, it has no doubt they will serve it diligently and to its satisfaction.

Martin continues to bring it tea. Sometimes the Archivist even drinks it. Martin seems to be on a campaign, forcing himself to keep coming into the office, looking at the Archivist, exchanging a few words with it. Maybe trying to trick himself into a sense of his new normal. Maybe hoping for a glimpse of Jonathan Sims.

The Archivist is more than aware of Martin’s feelings for Jonathan Sims. It is also aware of the low electric undercurrent of Jonathan Sims’ feelings for Martin, still very much alive, which stick to its bones and thrum. So far, neither of these sets of emotions are a hindrance to the Archivist’s work. It even entertains the notion that they might be a good thing. Human or inhuman, a boss’ relationship with their employees best functions on some level of personal attachment.

* * *

One day, Martin comes into its office without any tea. He is carrying an armful of filing folders, thick, distended, threatening to vomit their contents down his front and litter the floor. The Archivist looks up.

Martin meets its gaze and swallows thickly. He is resisting the urge to look over his shoulder.

“Daisy and Basira are—somewhere,” says Martin. He swallows again and rolls back his shoulders. “It’s, um—a bit. You know. Out there.” He trails off, the unsaid word _lonely _hovering in the air like half-blown smoke. He seems unsure of himself, and equally determined to follow through. He stares at the Archivist the way he always stares—a little reluctantly, a little from the corner of his eye, as if straining to catch a hint of something in its face, always on alert. He will be disappointed, but the Archivist sees no point in crushing his hopes just yet.

The Archivist gestures to the armchair opposite its desk and the low table that abuts it.

They do not speak. The Archivist gets on with its work. It records three statements back to back, two for the Vast and one for the Flesh, both of which are acutely satisfying. The tape recorder on its desk spins and listens eternally. Martin listens to the first statement, sitting tightly in the chair, his hands clasped between his knees; by the middle of the second one, he has visibly relaxed. Has even hesitantly reached out to open one of his files and look into it. The Archivist wonders if it is to do with its voice. The static crackle tends to fade a bit when it reads aloud.

They work in near-silence except for the Archivist’s voice intoning the fears of old statement-givers. Martin does not ask any of his questions. He props his chin in his hand and takes notes on page after page of casework in a beat-up spiral-bound notebook with a ballpoint pen. Occasionally he glances up at the Archivist, as if to check that it is still there. Once, he even yawns, and covers his mouth politely.

At five o’clock, Martin gathers up his things. He stands, folders and notebook clutched against his chest, and looks at the Archivist, who has not moved from its desk even once.

“Well,” Martin says, hesitantly.

The Archivist glances up.

“Yes?” it says.

Martin chews on the inside of his lower lip. He is bursting to say something, but he is holding back. The Archivist Knows this. It has a sense of what Martin wants to ask. But he won’t. He is still too afraid of the Archivist. Still under the impression that it might hurt him in some way. That this will always feel wrong, and nothing will ever feel normal in the Magnus Institute again. And it won’t—such is the nature of world-shifting change. He is still hoping for respite, and hoping that by magic the Archivist will vanish, and he will have his Jonathan Sims back again. He is thinking, _I escaped one horrible thing, and I will be rewarded for it. _This will not happen, and in some ways the Archivist even feels sorry for him.

“—Goodnight,” Martin says finally, in a very small voice.

No one has ever wished the Archivist _goodnight_ before. It is pleasant.

“Goodnight, Martin,” says the Archivist.

* * *

This becomes routine. Even when Basira and Daisy are back in the Institute, the Archivist will hear a knock on its door around nine in the morning, and Martin will come inside, holding the day’s work. The Archivist does not give him work; he is finding it for himself, somewhere. He has taken it upon himself to follow up on statements that haven’t been touched in a decade or more, and certainly aren’t of any importance now. Occasionally he copies out handwritten statements into a more legible hand and files them away for the Archivist’s perusal later. He sorts and refiles things into their proper folders. He even spends an afternoon organizing the Archivist’s bookshelves, which were in a constant state of disarray before it arrived, and which it has not touched since. When there is absolutely nothing else to do, Martin reads, or goes out to make tea for the both of them. They hardly speak to each other, except to greet one another in the morning and part at night.

The Archivist keeps close eyes on him. It is pleased to have company, and it thinks that perhaps Martin is benefitting from it as well. Every day he gets a little less pale, a little more solid. The panic attacks the Archivist has witnessed, from afar, in the Stockwell flat have diminished. Sometimes he even looks well-rested. This satisfies the Archivist. Any victory over the Lonely is a sweet one. It will not continue to be so simple, it knows; no one escapes Loneliness that easily. The wellbeing of the creatures bound to the Archivist is, if not of the utmost importance, then at least a fairly high priority. It will have to be on the lookout for changes in Martin. For red flags and signs. It observes itself curiously and is interested to find that it cares very deeply that Martin recovers. Not as deeply as it cares about its work, or the prevention of this or that ritual—but it cares. Perhaps Martin would be surprised to know this. Perhaps he would be pleased.

For a few weeks like this. Martin in the morning, in today’s thick cardigan or jumper. (He is always cold. Probably he will never get fully warm again. These things happen.) Martin bearing tea or a pastry from the coffeeshop he passes on his way to work. Martin settling into the Archivist’s armchair with a growing familiarity and a little sigh of effort. The clock ticking, and the only voice in the room that of the Archivist, reading, feeding. Martin disappearing only occasionally for lunch or to speak to Daisy and Basira. (Martin doesn’t eat much; he doesn’t have a very big appetite anymore. But he is trying.) At the end of the day, Martin going out, with a clipped, breathy _goodnight, _closing the door behind him.

These are rituals. These things harm nothing.

* * *

II.

Then the Archivist catches him. It catches the aftermath, rather. Martin comes in to its office on a Wednesday morning—he does not knock anymore—and the Archivist notes that his face is a little flushed, that he is sniffing and clearing his throat more than usual. The Archivist puts down its pen. Martin sits in his armchair and lets out a long exhale and clears his throat again and opens his spiral-bound notebook.

It observes him quietly for a little while, getting a feel. Martin’s brain is, as usual, humming with activity. There is a brighter cast to it than the Archivist is used to. His presence has a taste—all information is sensory, for the Archivist—and the taste is almost—the Archivist might use the word _sunny. _It understands now. Martin has been laughing. Hard, and for a long time.

“Something funny?” it asks mildly.

Martin looks up, startled to have been addressed. His eyes are brighter than the Archivist has yet seen them. This is progress. “Oh,” he says. He clears his throat again and looks away, as if embarrassed. “Um—no, not really. I, um—”

“It’s a good thing,” says the Archivist, returning to its notes. “You’re recovering.”

It can feel Martin watching it. Perhaps he is wondering how it Knows about the laughing fit he has just had in the breakroom, for absolutely no reason. Laughing until his sides hurt. Laughing until he could not breathe. Daisy and Basira were not present—the Archivist can tell that Martin is grateful for this. Laughing so hard he had cried. He had tried to splash his face in the washroom and had not been able to stop smiling in the mirror. It had been miraculous to him, the Archivist knows. To smile again after so long. An unfamiliar thing. It can feel relief, overwhelming, still coursing like adrenaline through Martin’s veins.

A truly Lonely person purges their emotions until all that is left is a shell that barely exists. It follows that to claw one’s way back out of that pit one must learn to feel again. The Archivist has never seen this process before, but it anticipates that it will be violent.

It takes a stack of yellow Post-It notes from the corner of its desk. _Eyes on Martin, _it writes, and sticks one neatly on the corner of its desktop monitor. It does not need the note to remember, but it likes the look of it, already curling at one edge, in Jonathan Sims’ scrawling handwriting. Something to do.

* * *

The Archivist anticipates the violence. Fits of laughter are all well and good, but joy is not the only thing Martin has purged. It keeps a watch on him during their quiet days together in the Archivist’s office. Martin has not asked about Jonathan Sims in a long time, and, if he is still not entirely comfortable in the Archivist’s presence, or with the Archivist’s permanence, he is at least making an effort to get used to it. Martin does his work. Sometimes he gets up and paces around the office for a little while, twisting the fingers of one hand in the grip of the other. His breath comes shallow. The Archivist will stop what it is doing to watch, though not overtly, until Martin returns to his seat and seems to have calmed down.

Loneliness is anathema to the Archivist. It hates it perhaps more than anything else. It can feel its jaw clenching when Martin shows too much anxiety, or becomes very still in his chair, as if daydreaming, lost somewhere. It is still irritated that the Lonely was allowed to exist inside its house for so long, and that it had gotten its claws so deep into one of the Archivist’s employees. Elias is not going to get away with a stunt like Peter Lukas again. His leash is short as it is.

It begins to grow angry when it becomes apparent that Martin is hiding things from it. He will leave for an hour or more and come back with tear-tracks still dried on his face, or a hand clamped to his side where the pain of frustration returning has cramped his gut. It is not angry with Martin, per se. It is angry that it cannot clearly See what is happening when Martin leaves. His bouts of feeling rushing back are blurred and frosted with curling tinnitus and television static. Each one is another step toward Martin’s return to humanity, to being a creature of Beholding again. This is a good thing. But the Archivist is greedy. It does not like being left in the dark.

One afternoon, between statements, it hears Martin’s breath begin to catch in his throat. Martin’s feet shuffle anxiously against the floor. He looks up at the clock, smoothes down the front of his jumper. He stands to leave, clenching and unclenching his fists. He turns toward the door, no doubt bound for the breakroom or an empty corridor where no one can see him.

“Sit down,” the Archivist says.

Martin stops dead. He clenches and unclenches his fists again. He doesn’t look at the Archivist.

The Archivist folds its hands together on the desk in front of it. It does not ask again. After a moment, Martin reluctantly returns to his seat.

His breathing is shallow and hitched. He grips the upholstery underneath him in clawlike fingers, clutching, pulling. He stares down at the table in front of him and works his jaw.

“I need to,” he says, “um.” He squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, one leg jittering.

“You don’t need to go anywhere,” says the Archivist, perhaps more softly than it had intended.

Martin makes a small noise, almost like a whimper. He clutches and grabs at the armchair seat. The Archivist thinks he might even tear through it, scratch it open with his fingernails. Martin inhales, but the breath is tight and it sticks in his throat. He unscrews his eyes and they are wet. He looks frantically at the door.

“Martin,” says the Archivist.

Martin whines softly. His chin is trembling, his mouth twisting.

“Can I go out,” he breathes, his voice pitchy, “please?”

“You don’t need to go out. We both know what is happening.”

“I don’t want—”

“Take your time,” says the Archivist. It points its eyes away from Martin, a courtesy. (Well—not _all _of them.) “Let it happen.”

“I don’t want it to happen in here with _you,_” Martin says.

It hits him then, as the Archivist knew it would. Grief. One of those difficult ones. Martin doubles over, his hands detaching from the armchair to clutch at his knees; his shoulders constrict. He gasps a breath. The exhale is a punched-out sob.

The Archivist watches, and does not move.

Martin sinks his face into the back of his hands. His spine heaves with crying. The office echoes with it. The sound of acute and unmistakable loss. There is nothing else like it. Every sob wrenches out of him as if it had been yanked from deep inside his lungs, and he seizes, curls upward as far into the chair as he can, clutching himself to himself, burying his steamed-up glasses and open, agonized mouth in his knees.

The Archivist feels a twinge. A few of its eyes twitch. It cracks its neck. It frowns.

“Martin,” it says, but Martin is too lost in it to hear. The Archivist begins to worry he is going to be sick. It stands up—hesitates. Then decides. It rounds the desk, slowly, and stands in front of him. It can almost feel the fevered heat of Martin’s misery.

“It’s only grief,” it says, softly. “It will pass.”

Martin’s every breath is a rattle. He clutches at his chest, where his heart is. He cannot even make noise anymore. The feeling of everyone he has ever lost barreling into him with the strength of a battering ram. The family cat hit by a car at age three. Friends he has not seen in decades and never will again. Two grandfathers dead in quick succession. An aunt on his fourteenth birthday. His mother. Jonathan Sims.

The Archivist reaches out to lay a hand on the crown of Martin’s head, an instinct from far, far, deep inside it. Its hand makes contact and Martin wrenches violently out from under it, curling even more tightly into the corner of the armchair, making himself as small as possible.

“_No,_” he moans, covering his head with his hands like someone sheltering from a bomb. “I don’t want _you. _I want_ Jon._”

The Archivist pauses, its hand still outstretched over the empty space between them.

How continually it seems to disappoint him, the Archivist thinks. It does not feel good. The Archivist is not used to this.

“Well,” it says. If Martin hears it, he gives no indication. The bout is almost over; the Archivist can tell by the slowing of his breathing, the space between his sobs. In his hair Martin’s fingers twist reflexively.

The Archivist returns to its desk. It sits down quietly, folds its hands, and waits for the grief to pass.

* * *

Martin does not come into its office the next day. The Archivist finds itself distracted. It has grown somewhat used to the quiet scratching of Martin’s pen on his notebook paper, or the occasional sigh as he rearranged himself on the armchair.

Beholding reminds it tersely that Martin is disposable.

The Archivist records the statement of Avery Carmichael, who complained of eyes appearing in the water stains on the ceiling above his bed, more and more every night until the ceiling bulged with them, until he felt that his skin would be peeled away by the intensity of their scrutiny, and Beholding quiets down a little, purring, momentarily satisfied.

The day after, there is a timid knock on the Archivist’s door. It is Martin, bringing tea.

The Archivist chooses not to mention their last meeting. It thanks Martin for the tea, and goes back to its work. If he stays, he is welcome. If not, all the same.

Martin lingers there by the desk, the way he had the first day, as if waiting for a cue. A signal. A change. He wants to say something.

“I. Um,” says Martin.

A few of the Archivist’s eyes slide up to him briefly. “Yes?”

Martin takes a long, shaky breath.

“I’m sorry,” he says. There is an upturn to the end of it, almost like a question.

The Archivist slides a few more eyes upward. “I don’t recall you having anything to be sorry for.”

Martin swallows.

“Recovery from Loneliness is a painful process,” says the Archivist blandly, “but a necessary one. I would appreciate it if you did not hide it from me.”

“It’s—”

“Embarrassing? I find it difficult to care about shame.”

“Well,” Martin grits out, “I’m not like you, am I?”

“No,” says the Archivist. “You are not.”

They look at each other for a moment. The Archivist considers that it may have come across a bit more harshly than it intended. Perhaps—and this is a novel concept to it—perhaps its feelings are a just a little bit hurt.

“For what it may be worth,” the Archivist says slowly, “I apologize, too.”

Martin stares at it.

“I am—Jonathan Sims. I am also not him,” it continues. Softer. “Not in the way you remember him. I imagine that must be a great disappointment to you.”

Martin’s eyelids flicker, just the smallest bit. His heart is hammering slowly in his chest. A steady tattoo the Archivist has come to recognize. Memorize.

“However.” The Archivist pauses, and then reaches out—takes the cup of tea from Martin’s hands. Their skin touches for just the briefest moment, and this time, Martin restrains his urge to flinch. The Archivist sees it. “I am a choice that he made. I cannot apologize for my existence. Please understand that I do not want to hurt you, Martin. I would like to see you recover, and I would like to see you do well.” It takes a small sip of the lukewarm tea, and curls its jointed fingers around its handle. “I have a vested interest.”

“Do you,” Martin begins, and then he stops. He stares at the cup of tea in the Archivist’s hands, where two of its eyes are looking placidly back at him. Martin frowns, as if struggling with something. He opens his mouth and closes it again.

Then, “Do you—do you—feel things?”

The Archivist sets the mug down. “Yes,” it says.

“Why?”

It is not the question the Archivist expects. It lowers all its eyes, ponderously. “A library without anyone to interpret its books is a useless library,” it says.

Martin looks at it for a minute longer. Then, he moves—he goes to the door and closes it, and then he sits down in his armchair, his back straight, looking directly at it.

For the moment, the Archivist thinks, there is not much more to say.

It has work to do. It does the work. Martin sits, and watches it. The Archivist can feel the mechanical overtures of his brain firing overtime. Coming to conclusions. Turning over assumptions. Examining, observing. He has always been good at that part of the job, the Archivist thinks. It knows this about him. A deep, discarded part of it remembers very clearly. Martin, so easy to overlook, and always looking.

Martin sits with it all day. He does not move to retrieve his own work. He does not ask anymore questions. The hours tick by on the clock and with every passing half hour the Archivist feels his gaze soften. Little by little. Degree by degree. At five o’clock, the Archivist looks up, and Martin—as if he has only now realized how long he has been staring—finally pulls his eyes away.

He gets up and leaves without a goodbye or a goodnight. The silence in his wake is heavy.

* * *

Martin’s fits are getting worse, as the Archivist Knew they would. By coincidence or concerted effort they are mostly happening after work hours, when Martin is alone in his flat, with only one or two of the Archivist’s eyes on him, spying quietly from faded picture frames and wrinkled movie posters. Whole nights Martin spends clutching the toilet bowl, splayed on the cold tile underneath it, wracked with the pangs of irritation coming back, or anxiety, or suspicion. Evenings where he paces the same route back and forth from his bedroom to the kitchen, hands over his mouth to keep from laughing too loudly and disturbing his neighbors, or to keep in the curses and bitten growls of anger returning. All of this it infers through the whining static that covers it. When he comes into the Archivist’s office—which he does again, now, in a way that seems both the same as before and distinctly different—more often than not now the signs of sleeplessness are apparent. Disheveled hair, untucked shirt, purple bags forming under his eyes.

These bouts of rushing emotions are no good if they cause him to neglect himself in their throes. The Archivist decides it must do something about this.

_Temperance, _warns Beholding.

For a little while, the Archivist remains detached, considering its options. And things resume. Martin in the morning. Statements read to the quiet room. Five o’clock _goodnights. _The Archivist is pleased that things have settled, for now. It enjoys routine. It sits in the office with Martin, watching—strategizing—turning things over to examine their angles, their consequences. It sits in the office with Martin, who writes and reads and covers his mouth when he yawns, and does not talk about his long, brutal nights alone in his flat. These are rituals. These things, for the moment, harm nothing.

* * *

III.

“Good morning, Martin,” says the Archivist, warmly, when its door opens.

Martin is visibly surprised. He stares for a minute, standing in the doorway, before he manages to stammer out, “Uh. Good morning.”

As always his arms are full of folders, a pen tucked behind his ear. His eyes shift from the Archivist to the armchair, which has been pulled closer to the desk. The low table has been moved.

“Please sit,” says the Archivist. “I have a proposal for you.”

Martin looks more nervous, suddenly, than he has looked in months. The Archivist suppresses a sigh. It waits patiently for Martin to take his seat, stiff-backed.

Last night it had watched him wrestle for two and a half hours with the sharp, insistent pain of guilt coming back to him for the first time. It had watched him curl up near the toilet in his bathroom and clutch his head in agony while his body shook and shook. From the rudimentary eyes of a watercolor print on the bathroom wall it had frowned, seeing him try to stand and stumble on the tile. For two and a half hours Martin had bitten out strangled noises and wrung his hands and ground his teeth into his lower lip so hard that it bled. It can still see the scabs this morning. All of this fogged with static, but clear enough to make its inky blood rise a little.

Now, Martin is sitting very still, as if he has been caught out. 

The Archivist won’t drag it out. It opens its hands.

“I would like to suggest that you move back into the Archives,” it says.

Martin blinks at it.

“What?”

“The Lonely is insidious. It is also selfish. We both know what is happening to you. You have been doing a fair job of weathering it so far.” It folds its hands again. A few of its eyes narrow on Martin, whose face is twisting more and more with confusion with every word it speaks. “But you live alone. You have no family.”

“I—I mean—”

“It was not a question.” The Archivist considers that its delivery may have been less than subtle; it tacks backward. “It was also not a judgment.”

Martin’s brow furrows and his mouth turns down at the edges. “I don’t—I’m fine. I am.”

“Are you? What will happen if a burst of feeling hits, and you fall, and crack your head open on the edge of your bath? What will happen if anger takes you on the street and a passerby takes offense?”

“I don’t—I don’t see how moving in here would—_help._”

Something is wrong. The Archivist did not anticipate this. It had imagined that Martin would be grateful. It feels its hackles rising in uncertainty. It does not like uncertainty.

“I mean—what? You want me to drop everything and come live here, in this—horrible place—where I’ll be even _more _alone after hours, when everyone goes home? At my flat I have _neighbors_—”

“Not alone,” the Archivist says, perhaps too hastily. “I don’t leave.”

Martin stares at it.

“I don’t _get _you,” he says, in a sudden burst, the loudest and most self-possessed the Archivist has ever heard him. Martin leans forward in his seat, gripping the arm with one hand as if to hold himself back. “I don’t understand you! I don’t even know what you are! You keep saying you’re Jon—but you’re not him. I don’t see him! You say you have feelings, you say—but I can never tell—do you really care about me? I mean, _really _care? Or is it just—that I’m useful to you? And you’re greedy, and you’re jealous. Which is it?” He takes a sharp breath, and then the Archivist sees him smile, an incredulous and frustrated and bitter smile. “Do _you_ even know?”

For once, the Archivist does not.

It stares at him. A few of its eyelids flicker.

Martin sits back heavily, as if drained. He scrubs his hands over his face, holds them there for a moment. When he drops them again they fall with weight.

“Maybe you don’t,” he says. He sounds exhausted. His voice is small. The Archivist doesn’t know what to say. “Maybe you’re just as confused as I am.”

Above them, eternally, the clock ticks.

At its elbow, the tape recorder spins, as always.

“Do you know,” Martin says, very quietly, not looking at it, “how hard it is for me, to come in here and look at your face?”

His mouth trembles, but he sets his jaw.

“I keep doing it,” he says. “I keep hoping that eventually it’ll feel real. Or that I’ll accept it. I keep thinking, _oh_—_if I keep at it long enough I’ll see Jon. He’ll let me know he’s there. _Somehow. But he won’t, will he?”

He looks at the Archivist, and for the first time in all its existence the Archivist feels—small. Pinned. Its shoulders tense. It listens.

Deep inside it a bit of old discarded soul is stirring, just the tiniest bit. Maybe it always was.

“I don’t hate you,” Martin says. His voice is the voice of someone who has been crawling through the desert on his hands and knees for a hundred years. Weary and weathered and far off. He closes his eyes, sinks into the chair. “I don’t even dislike you. I don’t know if you can help being him. I don’t really care. I’m tired. I just want things to be okay. For me. And Daisy and Basira and everyone. Even you, maybe. I don’t know. I just don’t.”

Now his lashes are wet. His cheeks are pink. His mouth isn’t so still anymore.

“I—I _love_ Jon.” His face contorts in pain for just a moment. Pain and grief, and then it settles again. He drags the word _love, _sighing against the _v. _“You know that. Everyone knows that. I miss him. And you aren’t him. And I don’t know what you want from me.”

Martin and the Archivist sit in the ticking of the clock for a long, long time.

Funny, the Archivist thinks. An entire universal history of knowledge at its fingertips, and it has no idea how to say what it means, or wants, to say.

Finally, Martin sniffs. He wipes his nose on the distended sleeve of his jumper. He leans forward, elbows on his knees, rubs his eyes beneath his glasses. For a moment he rests his chin in his hand, looking down at the bottom of the Archivist’s desk, where its shoes are barely visible under the backboard.

“Okay,” he says, at last. He says it hoarsely, and with more than a modicum of self-deceit. It isn’t okay. The Archivist knows, but it feels—helpless. “I’ll move back in.” He looks up at the Archivist through his watery eyes and sniffs again. He manages a brave and tearful little smile. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’ll be—better.”

“Yes,” says the Archivist softly. “I hope so.”

When Martin leaves, it looks at the Post-It note stuck to its computer. _Eyes on Martin. _

It had only been trying to help.

* * *

Self-reflection is not necessarily the Eye’s strong suit—it is better, on the whole, at looking outward. But the Archivist tries.

It feels that it must.

It does not like being asked questions it cannot answer, and Martin has given it a slew. Beholding pinches at it, annoyed, hungry. The statements go unread. The Archivist thinks.

It does care about Martin. It Knows this. It is frustrated that it cannot tell where the feeling comes from. If it comes from itself, or from what is left of Jonathan Sims, nervous electrical charge of emotion that he is, tucked away where he has no power. Perhaps it doesn’t matter. There is no singular source of human emotion. No seat from which everything flows. Just chemicals in the brain and certain firing neurons, the abstract concept of the _heart. _

The Archivist pulls its hair back and feels a little better.

It _likes _Martin. Martin is a hard worker. He is good company. The flushes of genuine fondness the Archivist feels when it sees him are real. The concern it feels when it thinks about him feebly fighting off the Lonely is real. The jealousy, yes. Its body reacts. All of this is real. It looks at the stack of unread statements and the tape recorder spinning nervously beside them. And if it is affecting its work—its highest priority—then it must be important.

Martin moved back into the broken humidity-controlled room in the Archives two days ago. He has not been in to work in the Archivist’s office, but he is around. Sitting in the breakroom, mostly, to do his work, and attempting gamely to converse with anyone who comes in. Once, the Archivist even hears him laugh. An eye, chipped haphazardly into the weathered stone of the back room where Martin sleeps by someone fifty or sixty years ago, when it was just a spare room, tells the Archivist that Martin has not had any fits since he moved in, and has slept more or less soundly, though sometimes he speaks in his sleep, and the name he says is the one the Archivist expects.

The Archivist wants to be present if and when the next bout happens. It wants Martin to want it there. It wants, more than anything, for Martin to trust it. Come to it for help. This is a tall order, but the Archivist hopes. All of this is real, and all of it feels very, very familiar.

Jonathan Sims was the Archivist long before the Archivist was Jonathan Sims. Perhaps there is only a negligable difference, after all. It feels what he felt. It takes that feeling for its own. It feels it differently, maybe. From a different angle, in different wavelengths, at different moments. It wants to protect Martin. It remembers Martin from before he was Lonely, and it wants that—wants to see that. Experience that smile. See that laugh. This knowledge feels imperative to it. It wants to Look and Watch and Know him. Observe. Interpret. Keep golden forever. Martin must be safe, and happy, and productive, and contented. This is integral. This is important to it. It doesn’t matter why.

In whatever way the Archivist loves, it _loves _Martin Blackwood.

The tape recorder shuts off, petulantly, by itself.

* * *

Around four in the morning a sound disturbs the Archivist.

It is a door closing just a few steps down the hall. Silence follows it. Damp, stony silence—the sound of the Magnus Institute in the very early morning. The Archivist breathes, sitting at its desk, which it almost never leaves, where it has been sitting since the Institute emptied out hours ago, leaving just it and Martin, alone.

There is only one person it could be, so it waits.

Martin has dragged the blanket from the cot in the spare room, clutching it in fistfuls around his shoulders. His glasses are off and his hair is matted to one side where he has slept on it. His feet are bare, and the Archivist considers that they must be cold. And there is a deep, painful twist to Martin’s face that, by now, is familiar. He looks at the Archivist and his eyes are bright in the dimness, bright with panic, or fear, or sadness, or something else awful, something else new to him, another gut-punch, another brutal step forward.

It doesn’t say anything. It turns its chair a little toward the door.

There is one lamp on in its office. An old green-shaded office lamp, with a dangling golden chain. It casts the desk in a pool of soft yellow light, which does not reach beyond the edge. The Archivist reaches out with Jonathan Sims’ burned hand and clicks it off.

When Martin climbs into its arms, he is already shaking, like a naked newborn bird in the cold. When Martin buries his face into the Archivist’s neck in the dark, and his hot tears snake down its skin and soak its collar, and his mouth opens to take wet, rattling breaths, and his ribcage shivers where it is pressed against the Archivist’s chest, the Archivist follows instinct. (Whose instinct? Does it matter?) It wraps its arms around him—not too tight. It holds him close. It rests its face against the side of his head, and it closes all its eyes. Jonathan Sims’ heart feels hot, burning hot, inside its chest. It breathes and its lungs make the sound of tape rewinding and uncoiling.

Deep inside it, what is left of Jonathan Sims, for the first time, has grown calm.

Martin presses closer. He is shaking hard enough to rattle apart, but the Archivist—it can hold him together. It Knows this.

These are not its rituals, but it will learn them. These things harm nothing.

* * *

Martin has two cups of tea in his hands.

He sets one down in front of the Archivist, and takes the other into his armchair, where he sits with his knees together, and waits until the Archivist has taken a sip.

They are not going to speak about the night before, the Archivist knows. It is fine with this. It imagines Martin isn’t very happy with himself, that he gave in to the urge to be held enough to overlook what was holding him. Or maybe he is still embarrassed, to have been seen in the midst of a surge like that. Either way, the Archivist doesn’t mind. It finds that it is happy to have helped.

They get to work. Things as usual. The Archivist drinks its tea and Martin sips at his. Martin yawns and flips through case notes and scribbles in his spiral-bound. The Archivist reads the statement of a woman who had escaped a never-ending escalator long enough to tell her story before stepping right back onto it the next day and vanishing into thin air. Beholding is not happy, but it takes its meal, and grudgingly goes quiet.

All day, Martin keeps looking at it. The Archivist notes this but does not look back. (Well—not with _all _of its eyes, anyway.) Martin gnaws at the inside of his lip, as if thinking hard. More than once the Archivist sees him doodling endless circles in the margins of his notebook, his eyes far away, scrawling knots so black they crease the paper.

“Something on your mind?” the Archivist says.

It knows, of course, what is on Martin’s mind. It cannot say it is surprised.

Martin looks at it. He knows that it knows, too. He waits, his gaze steady.

The Archivist puts down its mug of tea. It is nearly empty. It runs a four-jointed finger around its edge, contemplative.

“You’re going to try and get Jonathan Sims back,” it says.

Martin doesn’t blink.

“I felt him,” he says softly. “Didn’t you?”

The Archivist inclines its head.

“I did.”

Martin nods. He puts down his pen and sits up straighter, his spine against the back of the armchair, his hands flat in his lap.

“So,” he says. “How does that make you feel?”

The Archivist’s many, many eyes blink slowly. It raises a finger to its lips, and, by yet another old, deep instinct, picks reflexively at the chapped skin there, for just a moment.

“I think that it will be interesting to see you try,” it says, slowly. Its every gaze fixed on Martin. Martin, more full of color and vitality and life than before. One step further out of the Lonely. One step closer to being back where he belongs. With the Archivist.

When it looks at him, it _swells. _With pride, or satisfaction, or love, or all three. It doesn’t matter. All of this is real.

It smiles a little.

“It may even be interesting to see you succeed,” says the Archivist.

They look at one another for a long, long moment. And Martin smiles back.


End file.
